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Dana Goldstein

Dana Goldstein, a former associate editor and writer at the Prospect,comes from a family of public school educators. She received the Spencer Fellowship in Education Journalism, a Schwarz Fellowship at the New America Foundation, and a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellowship at the Nation Institute. Her journalism is regularly featured in Slate, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Beast, and other publications, and she is a staff writer at the Marshall Project.

Recent Articles

THE EVER EXPANDING DICTIONARY. Surely, one of the whimsical, wonderful things about the English language is its flexibility. New words Christened by Merrian-Webster this year include "ginormous" (gigantic + enormous) and "crunk" (a style of Southern rap). --Dana Goldstein

RETRO DAVE. David Brooks has a truly bizarre column today citing the lyrics of female pop stars as evidence of America's "formless premarital life, and the anxieties it produces." Apparently songs by Avril Lavigne , Carrie Underwood , and Pink expressing anger at cheating boyfriends and too-slick guys at bars prove that today's "lone ranger" young women, "product[s] of the cold-eyed age of divorce and hookups... face a social frontier of their own. They hit puberty around 13 and many don’t get married until they’re past 30. That’s two decades of coupling, uncoupling, hooking up, relationships and shopping around. This period isn’t a transition anymore. It’s a sprawling life stage, and nobody knows the rules." Hm. What would Brooks prefer? A world in which, thanks to social pressures to rush into marriage and motherhood, women stay with the first loser who crosses their path? In any case, he missed the best entry of the angry-girl genre, Lily Allen 's " Smile ." --Dana Goldstein

"DIE N-WORD." Those were the words of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick , who yesterday participated in an NAACP ceremonial "burial" of the racial epithet, complete with pine coffin and eulogies. Is the NAACP alienating itself from younger African Americans by excoriating a term commonly reappropriated in rap lyrics? The group's chairman, Julian Bond , told the Associated Press that younger members of the board were responsible for planning the event. Indeed, there is a movement within hip hop and pop culture to stop using the word: Check out Abolish the "N" Word and these comments from comedian Dave Chappelle . But politically-engaged progressives who critique the term are often accused of preaching from a place of class privilege. Are women more likely to embrace the c-word to describe their sexual anatomy if they don't live a life where they're slurred with the term? And how about "queer?" There's a word that, for its adherents, has a much broader meaning than the terms "gay" or "...

SHEEHAN V. PELOSI. Speaking of impeachment , Cindy Sheehan , the antiwar activist and mother of an American soldier killed in Iraq, says that unless Nancy Pelosi files articles of impeachment against George W. Bush , she will run against her for Congress in 2008. Guess Sheehan isn't out of the movement afterall. Sheehan is a master of political theater -- one of the only ones we have. But the question is, is she effective? --Dana Goldstein